Elizabeth M. Norman (4 page)

She was assigned to the hospital at Camp Edwards in Hyannis, Massachusetts. It was routine duty, too routine for someone so self-possessed, someone who “was out to experience as much as I could.” So she put in for a transfer.

A week or so later she went home to tell her mother. She had to deliver her news cautiously, for Sarah Cassiani had just had a heart attack.

So Cassie laid it out a bit at a time. She had put in for a transfer, she said … a transfer overseas … the transfer had been approved … she would be going soon, going overseas … overseas to the Pacific … to the Philippines … the Philippine Islands.

“You’re going where?” her mother said. She looked bewildered. Why was her daughter going half a world away?

Cassie tried to reassure her. “Let’s face it, Mom—did you know what was going to happen to you when you left Italy and came to this country? Did you know what was in store for you? No, but you came.”

Sarah sat in silence for a while, and Cassie was sure her mother would try to persuade her to stay, plead loneliness, perhaps, or invoke her ill health.

At length she leaned forward.

“I’ll pray for you,” she said.

And that was that.

In August 1941, less than four months before the first bombs fell on paradise, Sarah Cassiani kissed her daughter good-bye and bid her bon voyage. It was to be their last embrace; they would never again set eyes on each other.

T
HE RELIEF BUS
, loaded with five army nurses, fifteen Filipino nurses, two doctors and a few dozen enlisted men, left Manila around 4:00
P.M
. and crept along without lights for five hours before the driver finally arrived at his destination.

Stotsenberg, a shambles, was still burning, and the runways at Clark Field were destroyed. Almost every aircraft had been stripped of its skin, either blown off or burned down to the frame. The twisted hulks reminded one of the nurses of “dinosaur bones.”

In the darkness the medical team had trouble locating the hospital, and it was only when they heard the moans and cries of the wounded that they knew they were in the right place.

The nurses tried to set to work, but nothing in their experience had prepared them for the wanton slaughter of war, the sights, sounds and smells that make the heart race, leave the mouth dry, buckle the knees.

Cassie had never seen so many broken bones, so much scorched flesh, and the groaning and sobbing and wailing unnerved her. At one point she happened upon a large pile of discarded uniforms covered with dirt and blood. In the middle of this detritus lay a helmet, twisted like so much tin. What, Cassie wondered, had happened to the head inside it?

She tried to keep her bearing, hold on to her assurance. Stay in control, she told herself as she headed for surgery. No mistakes, no slipups. Be quick but be careful. Watch the sutures, check for shock, manage the bleeding.

Nearby, Phyllis Arnold was working on a sergeant who had bullet wounds in both feet. He was anxious to get back to the fighting, he said, and wondered how quickly he would heal. Arnold put him off; rest easy, she told the man, then she turned to the surgeon, who was standing behind her, waiting to amputate the man’s legs.

The last surgical case left the operating room at 5:30
A.M
. During the long night, the surgical team lost only seven patients, a remarkable record for peacetime clinicians, inexperienced with such trauma. But no one stopped to pat themselves on the back. At that point the number of dead at Stotsenberg totaled eighty.

In a daze of exhaustion the doctors and nurses wandered over to a makeshift mess hall for breakfast. Afterward some dragged themselves to temporary quarters for showers and sleep, but a few of the women, worried that the enemy might mount another raid, returned to the hospital and huddled in a concrete bunker under the pharmacy.

The chamber was small, putrid and cramped. Cassie looked around for a moment, then stepped outside for some fresh air. Just then, the enemy came roaring back.

Again the Zeros came in strafing. Cassie dashed across the compound and jumped into the deep end of an empty swimming pool, pressing herself against one of its walls. In minutes the raid was over, and she made her way to the shallow end and climbed out.

The base was burning again and thick black smoke from the fires filled the tropical sky, casting a dark veil on the green mountains beyond.

A
MONG THE OTHER
volunteers at Stotsenberg was Ruth Marie Straub, a quiet, square-faced woman who had joined the army in 1936 after graduating from Mount Sinai Hospital School of Nursing in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, her hometown.

Ruth was somewhat of a mystery to her comrades. They remembered her as a quiet woman who spent hours writing letters to her mother, Elsie Straub.

On a troop transport to Manila, Ruth had met Glen M. Adler, an army pilot and a graduate of the University of California at Los Angeles. Across the months that followed, she and Adler, both twenty-four years old at the time, fell in love and planned to marry. Adler, convinced that war was at hand and hoping to take advantage of an army regulation that allowed officers to send their wives home, was eager to wed right away. “But I wanted to wait until he could go with me,” Straub said. So they delayed. Then the bombs started falling.

Adler was stationed at Clark Field, and when word reached Manila that the field had been hit, Straub was the first to raise her hand to go. That night, she also began to keep a diary.

The document shows her to be a sentimental and, at times, fragile woman. Some people by temperament are ill-equipped for war—they feel it too deeply—and Ruth Straub was one of these. At one point she suffered a nervous breakdown and had to be hospitalized and sedated. Often in the face of such savagery the psyche simply shatters.

Still, Ruth, the nurse, did her job, and every evening wrote in her little book.

[Straub Diary, December 8, 1941]
News that Pearl Harbor had been bombed is here today. During a meeting of nurses and doctors Colonel Carroll announced that Clark Field had been bombed and that nurses and doctors were needed badly up there.

I had to volunteer. Thought I couldn’t wait to get there. Arrived at Stotsenberg at nightfall. The hospital was bedlam—amputations, dressings, intravenouses, blood transfusions, shock, death … Worked all night, hopped over banisters and slid under the hospital during raids. It was remarkable to see the medical staff at work. One doctor, a flight surgeon, had a head injury, but during the night he got up and went to the operating room to help with the other patients.

[December 9]
Reported off duty tonight and several of us crawled into a cement enclosed cubicle under a hospital ward. It was damp, and the air was putrid, but we really slept. Pure exhaustion. The girls are taking this beautifully.
⁹

Chapter 2

Manila Cannot Hold

F
OR THE NEXT
six days the Japanese pounded the islands. By December 14, the end of the first week of the war, the U.S. naval base at Canacao, Fort Stotsenberg-Clark Field and Fort McKinley all lay in ruins.

Sleepy little hospitals before the war, the army and navy clinics were now packed with wounded and dying men, and the military nurses and doctors in the islands were quickly becoming experts in trauma and triage, the medicine of war.

The enemy kept up the raids. With each drone of an airplane engine, the nurses looked skyward to see enemy bombers flying in large V formations, like the wings of a giant bird of prey.

In a sense the men had an easier time controlling their terror and dread; at least they could shoot back. The women, however, were left to manage the damage and loss, the awful inventory that battle always leaves.

The casualties overflowed the wards and spilled into the corridors, then into lobbies and onto the verandas. When the hospitals ran out of room and out of beds and canvas cots, they put the wounded out on the lawns and nearby tennis courts, laying them on old doors and scraps of wood and corrugated roofing.

There was so much trauma—so many wounds, so many dismembered limbs—that at one point, the nurses came to look on their labor with a dark irony: the bloody dressings, they said, made them think of the bright poinsettias that so typified their paradise.

With each raid the nurses were made to work harder and longer, and
soon they were so tired, so enervated by the surgeries and rounds of duty, they turned numb with fatigue. A young navy nurse, looking up from an operating table into the darkness at the fires consuming the once beautiful naval base at Canacao, told herself, “If the Japanese would just come over and drop another load, this suffering would be over, mine included.”
¹

The ranking medical officers in Manila, Colonel Wibb Cooper and Dr. Percy Carroll, annexed the Saint Scholastica Girls School, the Jai Alai Club and other places and turned them into dispensaries and aid stations, creating what they called the Manila Hospital Center, with Sternberg at the hub.
²

[Straub Diary, December 10]
This
A.M
. the commanding officer sent me to Manila on a special ambulance detail. Took four patients. Tried again to reach Glen before I left, but no success. Left word with the chaplain to tell Glen I would be back later in the day. Left about 11:15
A.M
. Caught in an air raid alarm as we reached Clark Field. The patients, driver and I hid in some tall, dry grass. Wondered if the message I left for Glen had been delivered.

Arrived at Sternberg late
P.M
. Air raid sounded just as we came in. Saw 77 planes overhead on way to port area which they bombed. During the raid, Colonel Carroll called me to the office: “You’re not to go back to Stotsenberg. Your fiancé has been seriously injured.” Dead? No. Thought I would lose my mind. Later Major Hubbard came down from Stotsenberg and told me Glen had suffered a basal skull fracture [at the base of the skull where the basic function of breathing is located], but that he’d be all right. Wonderful news! NO sleep tonight. UP and down stairs during several alarms.
³

On the day before Christmas the army nurses at Fort Stotsenberg prepared to evacuate the battered base. As they rushed to ready their patients and pack a few belongings, Cassie was told to report to a sergeant waiting for her in front of the hospital.

The soldier was standing beside an ambulance. He smiled politely and told her he had been ordered to prepare her for a “special assignment.” Then he held out a pistol and a green army sock filled with bullets. “Take them,” he said, climbing into the ambulance and motioning for Cassie to get in next to him.

“What’s going on?” she demanded.
⁴

A few minutes later, the sergeant stopped the vehicle in the middle of the jungle and hopped out. He was going to teach Cassie how to fire the weapon, he told her, and for the next few minutes he went through the basics, then he pointed at a clump of large banana blossoms and told her to start shooting.

This is movie stuff, she thought, but went along with it all even though “I didn’t believe I could do much damage.”

When they got back to the base, she discovered the reason for the dramatics: she’d been put in charge of a hospital train that was to ferry the wounded from Fort Stotsenberg to Sternberg Hospital in Manila, and “they told me I had to be armed to defend myself and the patients.”

Defend the patients? To hand a pistol to a healer was a desperate step for a desperate army, and Cassie was afraid. The nurse in her would do her job, no question of that, but she did not know whether she could play the soldier too and pull the trigger.

As she boarded the train “carrying this gun and bullets in a sock,” she felt a little “stupid,” so she set the weapon aside, checked her thirty patients, then settled in for the ride. The windows were open and the cool sea air filled the car.

As the train approached the city, she looked intently out the window, surveying the side streets for signs of trouble. She was looking as well for the three ambulances that were supposed to be waiting somewhere along that stretch of track to ferry the patients to Sternberg.

Suddenly the train jerked to a stop. Out the window she could see people fleeing. Then came the wail of an air-raid siren. Overhead appeared a large formation of enemy aircraft, another bird of prey, this one bearing down on the train.

The patients, many of them still in shock from earlier attacks, heard the drone of the planes and panicked. They began to yell and shout and struggled to free themselves from their bloody litters. One man with a tightly bandaged stump of a leg was struggling to right himself. Another recovering from multiple shrapnel wounds in both legs was pleading with the others to drag him to safety. An officer who had been diagnosed with shell shock and had been quiet now began to sob and laugh like a madman.

Cassie shoved her way through the panicked car and positioned herself at the exit. No one, she yelled, was going anywhere! And she ordered the men back to their seats and litters and told her orderly that if anyone tried to leave the car he was to use his weapon to stop them.

The bombers, as it turned out, had another target. When the danger
had passed, Cassie checked the wounded to make sure their sutures were intact, quieted the shell-shock patients and settled the car down for the rest of the trip.

When they finally reached Manila, she happily turned in her pistol and sockful of bullets, and in the weeks that followed, the war pushed the incident from her mind. Then one day in the field a month or so later, her supervisor approached, holding a piece of paper.